MY FRIEND THE PRESIDENT pIe's opera" that none of the people could afford. The not so secret history of the Opéra- Bastille began on January 13, 1989, the day Pierre Bergé fired Daniel Barenboim, the music and artistic direc- tor of the new Opéra, giving as his reason Barenboim's high salary and his choice of " 1 " (H a not popu ar program. e meant Mozart and Wagner.) Barenboim told me then, echoing Bergé's friends, that Bergé was "tired of being a businessman to someone else's 'artist' "-he said that Bergé wanted to choose everything him- self. And Bergé never denied it. It was another huge moment for him. He had finally separated from SaInt Laurent, and was living at the Lutétia and looking for an apartment. He had a new lover-a young American landscape architect- and a new politics, and he wanted a new life, his own life. "You know, when you meet, when you work with someone like Yves, it's a full-time job," he said, over baby artichokes and salmon, the day he showed me the apartment. (It was, for Bergé, an understatement; even now, wherever he is, he calls Saint Laurent ev- ery morning and every night.) "Now I live alone. I live here. It's fine. But for years and years I had to support Yves. Support him in the English and the French sense. Voilà!" And he added, "He's posses- sive. . . . I had given all my energy to him, and all of a sudden I gave a little bit to Mitterrand, I gave a little bit to Harlem Desir"-the founder ofSOS-Racisme- "1 gave a little bit to the Opéra. All that, I took from him." He says that it wasn't easy, and he's right about that, because the day the Opéra-Bastille opened Saint Laurent broke down, and ended up in the American Hospital. "Yves threw a wob- bly," a British writer who knows them both told me. "He didn't show at the col- lections. He did it to warn Pierre. The wisdom here is that Yves is the fragile partner. Not at all. But this time-for the fust time-Pierre didn't dote. It was too important." Bergé says, "For me these things were indispensable." A few people at the Opéra-Bastille welcomed Bergé. They knew that he wanted power-most Opéra presidents had been decoration, like chairmen of charity balls-but they thought that the man who made half a billion dollars a year for his company would use the power to put their company in the black, and keep the bureaucrats and the politicians at bay while Daniel Barenboim turned the Opéra-Bastille into another La Scala or Metropolitan. They thought he was "sen- sitive" to music, because he worshipped Callas and put the classics on the sound- track of Saint Laurent's fashion shows. They thought he was going to turn Baren- boim into another Saint Laurent. But Bergé's plan was to turn himself into a Saint Laurent. Pierre Boulez quit the board of the Opéra-Bastille when Bergé fired Barenboim, and he says now that Bergé had "delusions of grandeur. . . and no sense of the ridiculous." It was a disas- trous combination. Bergé's first decision at the Bastille had been to fue the admin- istrative director. Then he fued the tech- nical director. Then he fued Barenboim. And then he cancelled the curtain for the grande salle; Issey Miyake had designed it. In his five years at the Opéra, he hired and fued five more administrators and di- rectors, including Dominique Meyer and René Gonzalez-the two men who in- troduced him to Myung- Whun Chung, who became his music director. Boulez says now, "Bergé was incompetent at the administrative level and still more on the artistic level. The political people kept telling us he knew something. They said, 'But he was in charge of the Musical Mondays at the Athénée.' What he did was engage singers. That's easy: I call, I pay, you come. Musically, he had no idea." Myung- Whun Chung was thirty-six - -- ."*"'"". '" ;.:. : .. .:o. .. 0( ' '-.. 95 and conducting with the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra and Flor- ence's Maggio Musicale when Bergé met him, early in 1989. Bergé had been searching frantically for somebody to re- place Barenbo1ll1, and he had been having trouble, since most conductors had agreed with Barenboim when he said he was unprepared to let the head of a dress company tell him whether Pierre Boulez could conduct a "Pelléas" or Herbert von Karajan give a concert. A lot of the mu- sic world was boycotting the Bastille in protest, and the list included not only von Karajan and Boulez, who was arguably the most important composer and con- ductor in France, but Christoph von Dohnányi, Zubin Mehta, Carlo Maria Giulini, and Georg Solti. Bergé offered the job to Chung fifteen minutes into their first talk. He had never heard Chung conduct and, in fact, had never heard of Chung at all until Meyer, who was his general director, and Gonzalez, his artistic director, brought him to Paris to discuss a "Don Carlos" for the new house. (Chung said, sensibly, ''We're not ready for 'Don Carlos.' ") Hiring Chung- who had very few operas in his reper- tory-was what Bergé means by "not having to know a lot to do something." Chung says now, "He took this decision. It was crazy, or courageous, or both." It may have been Chung who had the LJ , . , ' , -.. . , .' . ". " / L Q " 9 .. .', f .. ,t :...... .. " '" If w CZJLWAÁ- . "How is the dollar trading against the Martini today, Jack?"